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Part of the CERES Fair Food newlsetter series, words by Chris Ennis.   You may remember last year Goldfields agroforesters, Mal Brown and Ben Boxshall, came down to the Fair Wood warehouse in Preston to talk sustainable firewood. Each year in Australia we collectively burn around seven million tonnes of firewood, much of it sourced in a not-so-transparent way from native forests as “fallen or dead wood”. There’s nothing as lovely as a wood fire, but there’s also nothing as lovely as a native forest. There’s an emerging movement of foresters who are thinking very differently about the timber plantations they manage. Mal and Ben from wood4good are such foresters. When I think of timber plantations I see acres of pine trees or blue gums clear-felled on maturity, debris burned and replanted again. When Mal and Ben think of timber plantations they see perennial forestsregulating and protecting land, water, biodiversity and climate. To Mal and Ben timber is just one of the by-products of a sensitively managed tree plantation.  Their goal for a tree plantation is to become a perpetual source of renewable materials, bio-energy and income.  wood4good are currently working in a 300 hectare red ironbark and sugar gum plantation owned by Greater Bendigo City Council.  Planted on degraded grazing land, the plantation is now twenty years old – the time for smaller trees to be selectively thinned giving larger trees room to mature into saw logs. The thinned trees, thick as fence posts, are traditionally seen as waste and pushed into piles and burned. Instead, wood4good sees this “waste product” as an opportunity to help pay for forest management as well as reducing pressure on native forests to supply firewood. Last year while Fair Wood was trialling sales of bagged firewood we had lots of requests and emails about supplying bulk firewood. Last week Fair Wood took delivery of a flat-bed truck and began dropping pallet cages full of Mal and Ben’s sugar gum firewood around Melbourne (that’s them in the pic below). Sugar gum, like red gum, is incredibly dense and slow burning – the two qualities of a good firewood. Read more about our Sustainable firewood here. You can also find 15kg bags of sugar gum here on the Fair Food website – we deliver them with grocery orders. 

Why burning Sugar Gum for our firewood is better than some other more readily available alternatives out there This time of year, and almost any place you go to buy your firewood, you will see (River) Red Gum. It is ridiculously easy to source and you would be forgiven for thinking it’s the only wood you should be burning. But, like most things, there is more to it than initially meets the eye. The majority of the Red Gum we burn in Victoria is sourced from private and State forests that are in the environmentally significant Murray and Darling River floodplains of Victoria and New South Wales.  And whilst it appears to be readily available and burns to generate a lot of heat, its harvesting comes at a heavy price to the ecological health of our old growth remnant native forests.   Collecting fallen or dead trees from native forests for our fires is an old tradition but these fallen or dead trees are homes for many endangered squirrel gliders, brush tailed tuans and carpet snakes.   So what’s the alternative? As a general rule of thumb Red or Box gum almost always is coming out of remnant native forests, so that’s worth remembering when making your buying decision. Ask your supplier about where they source theirs from. Fortunately, there are alternatives too. It’s best practice to look for Sugar or Blue Gum sources. This is what is currently being grown in sustainably managed forests. For any other brix or composite products, sourcing cannot be guaranteed so should be avoided.       CERES Farm-grown firewood makes use of Sugar Gum plantation thinnings that would otherwise be burnt as waste. These forests are established in largely cleared landscapes such as Victoria’s Goldfields and the Riverina and has a range of benefits for both the natural environment and the health of our farming communities. We are very fortunate to be working with the good folks over at Wood4Good. They want to see forestry become part of our collective solution by planting forests in a way that provide a perpetual source of renewable materials, bio-energy and income. They do this by planting new forests on degenerated farmland and then effectively manage and sensitively harvest over time so that biodiversity is protected.     Sugar Gum is also a much better long and hot burning source than other alternatives such as Red Gum. Sugar Gum has a Relative Available Heat Value of 95% where as (River) Red Gum is 81%. (Victorian Department of Primary Industries, Gavin Brook 2004). When burnt properly, using firewood from sustainable sources to warm your home can be less polluting and more environmentally sustainable than other methods as well. It’s good to know that your fire source this winter can have many positive impacts for our ecological and social communities.   Get in touch with us today to order your winter’s worth of firewood. For further reading about sustainable firewood please visit: https://vnpa.org.au/conserving-nature/sustainable-firewood/   Read more about Wood4Good here.